Why the tech industry can't crack the smart home

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Neil I. Patel

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor in chief of the Verge and decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today were going to talk about one of the oldest, most important, and most challenging dreams in the history of the tech industry, the smart home. The idea of your house responding to you and your family and generally being as automated and as smart as your phone or your laptop has inspired generations of technologists.

But after decades of promises, its all still pretty messy. I have a lot of smart home gear in my house, and ill be blunt, none of it really works well unless you want to spend a lot of time and effort custom designing your own setup or paying someone else a lot of money to do it for you. And even then it can be kind of hit or miss. But there are some promising developments out there that might make it a little better, one from big tech and another from the open source indie community. To help sort it all out.

I'm talking to Verge smart home reviewer Jen Tui, who is one of the most influential reporters on the smart home beat today. Now, the big problem with the smart home has been blindingly obvious for a very long time. Its interoperability, different smart home gadgets from different companies, just don't work very well together, and they don't all work with your phone or the voice assistant in your house in the same way. That means you either have to lock yourself into one company's ecosystem, like Apple or Google, or you're going to spend a bunch of time figuring out ways to force things to work together. The good news is that the big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung know this is a problem, and they've put out a standard called matter, which launched in 2022.

At its heart, matter is supposed to be like HDMI or USB or Wifi for the smart home, a way for different device types to talk to each other no matter what platform you use to control your smart home. But new kinds of devices have been added to matter in a painfully slow way, and the platform owners like Apple and Google have been dragging their feet on supporting whatever new device types do get added to matter. Matter has been around for two years, and as youll hear Jen say, not much has really changed because of it. That said, things are moving. This week marks the launch of Matter 1.3, which adds a bunch of new device types and capabilities to the standard.

Ideally, that pushes the platform owners to expand their support for matter and things get a little bit more seamless and easy to use. Jen and I ran down all the things that matter can do now and what it still needs to do to solve some of the problems that still persist. But here's the thing, that's what's happening on the big tech side of the house. There's a really long running debate in all of computing about whether letting big platform owners run software for you is better than running software yourself on a server in your home. And there's an open question as to whether consumers want or need a computer like that in their home that controls basically everything so that they can troubleshoot their own smart homes.

And there's a lot of movement on that side of things as well. A number of open source hobbyist projects have sprung up to fill in gaps in the platforms that Amazon and Google and Apple offer their customers, and some of those projects are going from hobbyist status to full fledged products. You'll hear Jen and I talk a lot about home Assistant, which is open source smart home control software that has now launched a foundation focused on privacy and security so it can try to grow even bigger and offer a counterbalance to the big tech version of the smart home. Home assistant also has a new hub called the Home Assistant Green, which is supposed to sit in your house and connect to everything else. There's a lot of other projects focused on local control and privacy that are kind of bringing us back to those DIY roots of the smart home.

And I gotta say, the more I mess with my own smart home setup, the more I think that maybe turning your house into a computer should require you to build your own system so you can fix it when it breaks. Or at least that's what I tell myself when everything breaks in my house. Okay, the state of the smart home. Here we go.

Jen Tuhey, welcome to Decoder. Hello, Neelai. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited about this episode.

I think our producers are very worried about it because when you and I get going talking about smart homes, all hell breaks loose and then everyone spends a lot of money and then things only slightly work. But I think we can solve it today. That's our goal for this episode, solving the smart home. We can do it in 30 minutes. So there's two things that really made me want to talk to you about it.

Obviously you've been covering the space for a long time. You know all the players, you know all the people. The idea has been pretty simple for a very long time. Your house should be full of sensors and various products in your house should be able to take action for you react to those sensors. You open the door, the heat turns on, the lights are on, the shades move.

That idea has been around since the fifties. It's a very old idea and we've been stumbling towards it for quite some time. I think with the advent of mobile phones and cheap arm processors and Android now there's like a million products that can do this stuff for you in your house, but it still doesn't quite work. Can you describe the current state of smart home technology? Yeah.

Jen Tuohy

So today what the smart home does really well is solve a singular problem that you might have. So, like, you go and buy a smart device to make sure you can shut your garage door remotely or turn your lights on and off with a voice command. If you have something you want to do in your home, smart home technology can help solve that. That's what it does really well. The smart home has succeeded in these single use case solutions.

What it's not doing well yet and where the most potential is is that integration where things work together. I'm not saying it never works. There are motion sensors to turn on your lights. Great experience. There's lots of different elements, like you can have geofencing so that as you drive up to your house, your lights turn on, your door unlocks.

Those types of things work, but you have to have the right devices, you have to have the right system. You have to do a fair amount to set it up. So, yeah, those kind of magical moments, those experiences that we think about when we think about a smart home, a home that reacts to us intelligently, those are still hard to do. That symbiosis, that whole intelligent home still feels far away or hard to get to. I mean, you can do it, but you will be spending a lot of time.

Neil I. Patel

Yeah. It's not even necessarily money. It's time. We both have these. You have a vastly more confusing smart home situation than I do because you are our smart home reviewer.

But it's not money you can spend a lot of money in, and it won't work. You have to spend the time making it all work together. And that seems like the core problem. Right. The smart part of the smart home still is very reliant on some individual homeowner doing a system integration and, like, making all the stuff work together, whereas the sort of, I moved the light switch to be a button on my phone is, well, unsolved.

Jen Tuohy

Right? Yes. And you can spend a lot of money and pay someone to do it all for you. That's another world. But it's interesting because you can see from those examples, like the high end, professionally installed systems, that it is possible to have all of this work seamlessly together, but with round the clock it support and well trained people.

I think one of the other big problems, even in those scenarios of the smart home today, is that it doesn't work for everyone in the smart home. I'm my home sysadmin. I'm sure you're your home sysadmin. My husband and my children could tell you some stories about how much they dislike living in a smart home, but then there are benefits, you know, that they miss when we're traveling. Like, oh, my son isn't very good at using light switches, and he's never used a key.

Neil I. Patel

Incredible. My son isn't very good at using light switches. Is one of the most diverge outcomes I can possibly think of. It's very good. So.

Jen Tuohy

But yes, you know, not everyone understands smart homes. Unless everyone's on board. It can get really complicated for anyone living in the home. Your home starts to have a user interface in a very real way. You have to know how to use your house very much so, yes.

Neil I. Patel

So this gets to kind of the heart of the problem. Right. The idea is anyone should be able to use the house. A small idea with massive implications, but that kind of means, like all the devices should show up on everybody's phones, however, the phones wish to express home control. All of your voice assistants should be able to talk to all the things.

So you can just tell Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant to do something and it should happen. The user interface of your house should be expressed everywhere. That user interfaces are expressed the same way that, I don't know, Netflix works on every device that you might have, or you can open Google Docs on any device with a browser, and it just works. None of that seems to work in the house yet. There is a standard that we cover quite a bit, that you cover quite a bit called matter.

They just had a new release that was supposed to fix it, but it just seems like it's very incremental progress. What is going on with matter? So matter is a connectivity standard that's designed to make us smart devices work better together. Right now, the problem, as I've expressed, is it's confusing, it's complicated, it requires a lot of time. I often get these comments, well, why would you need a smart light where you can just go flip the switch?

Jen Tuohy

Everything works well, but the smart home can make it better. The smart home can make things easier. There's a lot of advantages around, like energy management, security, safety, convenience, comfort, all the stuff. But right now, the communication between devices is really poor. The interoperability is a real struggle.

Matter is designed to create one common communication thread so that everything can work together alongside matters. There's also something called thread, and along with Wi Fi and Ethernet, thread is the main protocol that matter runs on. So thread is a wireless protocol that was specifically built for smart home devices that use low power and low bandwidth, like sensors, smart locks, lights. It's similar to Zigbee and Z wave protocols, but it's ip based, and it doesn't need a central hub or bridge for communication because thread devices can, can talk directly to each other. Thread does need a thread border router, though, to talk to the cloud and to other networks.

The first matter spec launched in 2022. It's been two years, which is not a huge amount of time in the scheme of things, but everyone has really been wanting, like needing a standard like this because the smart home is just so fractured and confusing and complicated right now. I've been following it very closely and it feels like it's just not moved forward. But this new release 1.3, which was just announced yesterday, adds about five or six new device types so matter now really covers most of the categories that you'd want in your home, except for cameras and security systems. But they've added ovens, extractor hoods, cooktops, dryers, and that's in addition to thermostats, blinds, robot vacuums, refrigerators, freezers, locks, thermostats, pretty much all the appliances in your home.

Plus there's also a robust energy management addition to this spec which will open up a lot of really interesting use cases and water management for things like leak detection, freeze detection, rain detection. So there's a lot here and I think it's going to be a really interesting shift for matter. The problem is this is an industry standard and it's been developed by all the companies that create smart home devices and smart home platforms led by Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung and it's just kind of sat there like nothing has happened. In the last two years, Apple has not added any of the new device types from 1.2 to the home app. Who knows when they'll get to 1.3?

Amazon and Google have similarly been dragging their feet. None of the new device types from 1.2 are supported. Samsung has been a little more proactive, but for example, none of them support robot vacuums in matter yet. So we're waiting for the platforms to step up and say, okay, we created this standard, now we're actually going to let you use it because right now they're dragging their feet and I don't know why. We need to take a quick break.

Neil I. Patel

When we're back, Jen and I dive into why smart home standards have not been as effective as HDMI or Bluetooth.

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Dot just go to constantcontact.com right now. Constant contact helping the small stand tall Constantcontact.com dot last week, Kanye west accused one of the biggest Twitch streamers of being an industry plant. It's an idea that comes up so often on platforms like TikTok and elsewhere. You see people who have blown up seemingly overnight, and the question is, who's behind them, right? That's what everyone wants to know, tipping the scales and pulling the lever to make them seemingly the next it thing on the Internet.

Jen Tuohy

This week on Poweruser. Is it even possible to create an industry plant on the Internet? And if so, how?

Neil I. Patel

We're back with Verge smart home reviewer Jen Tui to talk more about matter and what has made existing smart home standards so lackluster. We cover a lot of standards here at the Verge. They are invisible. They are undercover. Generally.

They are usually dominated by rich companies doing politics with each other. HDMI is a standard. HDMI is a surprisingly political standard, and it just plugs rokus into tvs. It's still surprisingly political. Bluetooth, maybe the most political standard of them all.

Matter feels like it hasn't even gotten to the politics stage because no one's adopted it. And my theory is that no one's going to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone because it supports robot vacuums. When you can just open the robot vacuum app. No one's switching from Android to an iPhone because the home app on the iPhone supports range hoods. Now, there's not competitive pressure on that, and I'm wondering if you see that in your reporting that this is a great idea and everyone knows that in theory there should be a usb for home stuff or a wifi for home stuff, this big standard that everyone agrees on, that no one messes with too much, that everyone can trust.

And that is a great idea in theory. And then the reality is there's not actually any competitive pressure to use it because no one's switching because of it. No consumer actually can see it or care about it. I think you're right. In my world, the people I talk to are all super excited about it and they see this as the future.

Jen Tuohy

But I feel like the next levels up in their companies are really not that interested. I think there was a push where all of these companies thought, okay, matter is something we need to do because it will help grow the smart home and that will help our bottom line in whichever way we're involved in the smart home. But ultimately, the competitive pressure hasn't arrived because the smart home still is a very niche space. I think what is going to change, and I think what's probably going to help push the platforms towards making and adopting these changes is the introduction of appliances. We're going from smart lights and sensors to dishwashers, washing machines, ovens, cooktops, big appliances, h vac systems that are in everyone's homes, and that those manufacturers are actually going to push connectivity because actually it benefits them significantly.

It makes it a lot easier for things like service and repair. And then there's also the data side. I do think we're going to see a push once a lot of the big companies start producing devices. It's a chicken and egg situation. Once there are matter devices out there, we will see the platforms moving more quickly to adopt support because there'll be more pressure.

But we're in a moment of stasis right now, and consumer pressure is important there, too. I think we need to say this is what we want. We need to push for it because we don't want to rely solely on the cloud to run our homes. This is one of the biggest arguments I see against the smart home today, is the cloud is great, but it can't be the only way your device connects to your home. Matter helps resolve that problem because it's a local protocol.

So even if the company goes out of business, you're still going to be able to control your smart devices using the platforms that are compatible with matter. Yeah, we just bought a new LG washer and dryer, which does not have matter. They're supposed to by now, but they don't. And first of all, they are just always talking to the network. I don't know what they're doing.

Neil I. Patel

They're just banging away, just sending packets left and right. I don't know why some of those packets are notifications to me that the washer is done, which is not useful. And I need to turn them off. But even when I want to control them back, my phone doesn't actually talk to it. It bounces up to LG's cloud and then back down to my house, which just seems inherently silly to me.

And you're saying matter would make my phone talk directly to that appliance. Exactly, yes, because it would all work on your local network, although just to make things more complicated. And because this is about standards, and there's always politics and standards. There is a competing standard, the Home Connectivity alliance, which is all appliance manufacturers, and that's all cloud based. They say that there's tandem harmony between the two standards.

Jen Tuohy

But for the consumers, matter, I think, is the one that I would champion, because matter will help you have more control over your devices locally, and subsequently more control over your data, and also reassure you that your devices are going to continue to work in the way you're expecting them to and not have a negative change or degradation over time. This is one of the reasons I think we've really struggled to see the smart home take off is because of this confusion and this concern. And this is where, you know, a standard like matter, and you said it earlier, you know, it is a Wi Fi for the smart home. It's a Bluetooth for the smart home. That's exactly what it is.

And that is what ultimately the connectivity standards alliance, which oversees matter, is trying to accomplish. Matter isn't or shouldn't be the story. Matter is the connective tissue, the interoperability. But this is something that we really need to make the smart home work. We're now in a position where I really think it's up to the platforms and the manufacturers to step up and say, okay, we decided to do this.

We're going to follow through. Well, the good news is we're in OS launch season, right? Apple is going to announce new versions of iOS shortly at WWDC. Google is going to have I o, or we're going to see Android in the next few weeks. So hopefully there's some movement there.

Neil I. Patel

There's another piece of puzzle I want to focus on for just a second. It's where the smart home software actually lives. A lot of the big companies seem to think there should be some point of centralization for Apple, its home kit. For Samsung, it's smartthings. Google has Google home.

But ultimately, the smarts have to happen somewhere. Someone has to write some code to tell your devices how to operate and interact. That code needs to live somewhere, it needs to run somewhere. Someone has to fix it. When it breaks, someone has to issue security updates.

We were basically saying there should be a server somewhere running your house. Maybe that server is more abstract. It's running in the cloud. Maybe it's more distributed. It's running in all the devices in your house.

That's sort of how Apple's HomeKit works. But maybe it should just be a server, a computer in your basement that's running the code that operates your smart home. There's a lot of different ways to handle it. All of these approaches are out in the market, but the big platforms have not done a good job of making it clear where all the software is running and why their competing visions for how that software is organized are structured. When we go back to this beginning of the smart home with the original smartthings and the revolve hub and wink, this was when we all started to sort of take the smart home.

Jen Tuohy

The DIY smart home takes some interest in it. That was all hub based. So we had these little white boxes with multiple radios in, but for some reason, we could never have one little white box with all the radios in. There was always one missing. You could still never have everything talk to each other.

And then, so the hubs went away because the big platforms came in and were like, hmm, we don't need to do this with hubs. We can do this all in the cloud, and we can make all these devices talk to each other. And interesting fact, Lloyd. Samsung bought smartthings. Google bought revolve.

Amazon launched Alexa, and Apple launched HomeKit all in the same year. So that all happened in 2014. So that was the beginning of this new smart home, the DIY smart home. And what happened then is, you know, wow, this is so much easier. You don't have, consumers don't have to buy this little hub.

You can just use your phone to control everything. But then the lag and the control issues and not everything working with each other, and it all became something of a confusing mess. And that's how we sort of ended up with matter coming in to kind of fix it all and bring us back to the idea of a hub, which is essentially what matter is doing, but in a different name, because the word smart home hub became like a dirty word. No one wants hubs because they're expensive and confusing. Sorry, I disagree with you in a small way, right.

Neil I. Patel

Which is, if I could just buy a smart home product for my basement, that was an actual product with an interface, and it's where everything connected to and I could log into it and open it and see it. And when it broke, I could unplug it and plug it back in. I think that would be good, right? I think it would conceptually be simpler than these. Weird.

It's half on your phone, half on your Alexa. Where's the computer? It's a real question I think most people don't know the answer to in the concept of the smart home. And now there's this a project called home assistant that you've been covering. They're going from kind of a hobbyist group to being more of a real foundation.

They are selling a product like this called the home assistant green. It seems like there's some real action there. Yes, for sure. And so, yeah, we're coming back to hubs, essentially, is what happening. There is a problem with hubs.

Jen Tuohy

I agree with you that having one computer running your smart home sounds like the ideal, but the problem is when that computer dies, your home dies. So that is a bit of a failure point. And this is one of the areas of matter and thread that is trying to solve that issue, where you have multiple devices in your home that are all essentially running the computer matter controllers and thread border routers. But we're not at a point yet where you can reliably run your home with matter controllers and thread border routers. For a number of reasons that I have written extensively about, politics probably being one of them.

I think matter will get there, and I think Fred will get there. But right now, that's leaving a big sort of open space for new platforms to come in and say, look, we have a solution that's going to work for you right now, today, and we'll work with matter and thread in the future. Because I get emails constantly from readers saying, I want to set up a smart home, or I'm moving to a smart home, or I want to expand my smart home. Do I have to wait for Matt to be here and be ready before I can do anything? No one wants to tell someone, you can't buy any gadgets.

I mean, that's just not something that we do. There are solutions today that mean you can use your smart home and devices today, but be set up for the future when matter finally gets its act together. And that's where home assistant, and as you mentioned, the home assistant green really comes in. So home Assistant is a smart home platform, like Apple Home or Google Home. And what's exciting about it is it's open source, and it also has a very strong focus on local control and privacy.

But traditionally, home Assistant has been complicated to get started with, you need to run a home assistant server on a raspberry PI or a variety of hardware options. And while you can still do that now, there's actually an easier solution. You can pick up a home assistant green, which they're about to start selling on Amazon for Dollar 99, which is a big shift. The company and the green is a one stop shop for home assistant. It's a smart home hub that comes with the OS pre installed, just making it easier to set up and get running.

Home Assistant is an open source, community driven smart home platform that really made its name because it's one of the few systems that everything works with, but not everything works very well, which is always one of these issues with the smart home because of this interoperability problem. So home assistant just launched the Open Home foundation, which is a way of setting separating its business model from its ethics and ideals. So the Open Home foundation is actually an organization that is consumer advocate in the smart home. It's looking to try and help push forward better smart home products that work locally in your home. So you don't have the issues that we were talking about earlier about cloud control.

They have a lot of really interesting, lofty ideals. But the device itself, the home assistant green and the home assistant platform is a very powerful smart home platform, probably a little too powerful for most people. And it can be really complicated to set up devices in home assistant. But with these updates to matter, I think we'll see home assistant shift more into the mainstream because it will be easier to set up devices in home assistant than it is today. And home assistant will become a matter controller.

And you need a matter controller from the platform you want to use in order to set up and control matter devices. I know that's a lot of matter and a lot of control, but basically a matter controller is like a hub. They just didn't want to call it a hub. There are other platforms that are also doing this. Acara, which is a smart home company that a lot of listeners might be familiar with.

They make sensors and cameras and smart lights very inexpensive. They've worked with Apple Home for years, and Acara has just released last week its own matter controller thread border router. So you don't necessarily have to use Apple Home or Amazon Alexa, or Google Home or Samsung smartthings, because this open source matter smart home standard anyone can use, you don't have to be one of the big tech companies. So all of these platforms, whether it's home assistant or habitat or Homebridge, they're all using a single hub to control and communicate with your devices. So we're definitely seeing a shift back toward the hub idea, especially because of local control and the security and privacy it offers you, versus relying entirely on the cloud.

Neil I. Patel

We need to take another quick break. When we're back, Jen and I get into what the future of the smart home might look like.

Eurovision is here. This year's contest gets underway this week in Malmus, Sweden. But this year's contest comes with a dose of controversy. I'll give you one guess as to what people are mad about. Yes, correct.

Jen Tuohy

It's that organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest say they are assessing whether Israel's entry breaks the rules on political neutrality. I think it's a shame. I think there is no way that Israel should be able to participate in. EU palestinian protesters are taking to the swedish streets. More than a thousand swedish artists, including Robin, have called for an Israel ban.

Some european politicians are joining them. Charlie Harding from switched on pop joins us this week on today, explained to help us figure out if Europe can sing its way out of this situation.

Jen Tuohy

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Neil I. Patel

We're back with verge smart home reviewer Jen Tuhey to talk about where the smart home is headed next.

So we've talked about matter, how it's changed recently, but how much further it still needs to go. And we've touched on this pendulum swing between hubs and giving consumers more control over what their smart home looks like and how these devices should actually talk to each other. Home assistant is one version of this. It's a fascinating project because of that foundation you mentioned, because it started as this hobbyist project that's now evolved into something much more legitimate and stable. You said, maybe it's a little too powerful.

I think that is a reflection of the fact that it was built by enthusiasts. For enthusiasts, it can just do everything. It is a computer and you can program it. You can program your smart home like a computer. If you use home assistant.

I know people who spend their weekends just writing code for their home assistant setups. Yes, and that's great for those people. That's a wonderful way. I have been that person and we'll get to why I'm no longer that person in a second. But the Open Home foundation, which is going to run home assistant, they just started, and their mission statement is very idealistic.

The mission statement, I'm just going to quote, is to fight against surveillance capitalism and offer a counterbalance to big tech influence in the smart home by focusing on privacy, choice and sustainability for smart home users. How does that square with. Also, when you buy whatever cheap cloud connected gadgets, we will control it because the goal is to control everything. Right? Like, there's a real tension there that the platform might respect you, but all this hardware you're deploying around your house might just talk to the network for no reason.

Jen Tuohy

So actually, what's also quite new for home assistant is it also has a works with program, which is something you might be familiar with if you've ever bought any smart home device that says, works with Alexa or works with Google. Basically, it's saying this device will work with your platform. Well, and we have guaranteed that this will work on your platform. But home assistant uniquely is saying that it will not allow any device that only relies on the cloud to carry its works with labels. So it will work with home assistant even if it works through the cloud, it has to have a local connection to get that label.

It can work via the cloud, but it also has to have a local control element because, yeah, you're right, there's a tension there that these devices have the potential, if they're sitting in our homes, to, as I mentioned before, stop working, not work the way you expect them to change the way they work. What it's doing, though, is it's putting the onus on the user. So if you choose to put a device in your home that is reliant on the cloud, you need to understand the risk there. What matter and what home assistant does today is all works locally. Every device that works with matter is a local device, except for if you choose to opt for a device that talks to the cloud.

Talking to the cloud is not a bad thing. I just want to make that clear. There are lots of benefits of talking to the cloud, but unfortunately, there are also downsides. You just have to be aware. It's hard for the consumer to understand what they're taking on every time you buy a device like that.

But then you get the advantages. Like, for instance, when my smart thermostat knows it's going to be really cold tomorrow and it starts heating up earlier to keep me warmer. It's a struggle. I agree. It's going to take a while to work through this because right now it's very much a hobbyist platform and as it tries to appeal to a larger audience, there's going to be some tension.

Neil I. Patel

One of the reasons that I moved away from home assistant to another kind of community project called Homebridge was that my wife, my child, they look at their phones, they look at their iOS devices, and so if you want to expose the control of the smart home to them, it had better be on their phone. That's where it is. And that's just the reality of the situation. If there's not a tile and control center on my wife's phone, she is not going to use it. No.

And once I came to that realization about seven years into our marriage, I was like, okay, I'm just going to accept this. I was like, okay, I'm just going to move everything to Homekit. I'm going to move everything to Apple's platform. And Homebridge, another community project, just lets you do that. It's just middleware.

It sits in your house. I always call it a Tamagotchi because it's finicky and you got to feed it every couple of days. But it's basically a little Linux computer running on a raspberry PI and it just bridges everything into the tiles in control center. That feels like one, like I gave up. Like I turned my back on this idea of this brilliant smart home running, this custom platform basement.

But two, it also feels like a very important reality for everyone. One, we'll just end where we started, which is you saying this has to be for everyone in the house. And if it's not in that default interface on whatever phone you have, or it's not easily accessible from your Alexa screen or your Google Home screen, your hub devices there, your smart displays, it might just go ignored. That feels like the hardest part of this is to make that interface so pervasive. It's the promise.

But at the end of the day, it does seem still pretty gated by what the big platforms are going to allow you to do. Very much so, yes. And the big platforms are definitely going for the widest common denominator. They're not interested in really appealing to the hobbyists and the enthusiasts, which is where I think platforms like home Assistant and Homebridge will always have a place. And for the tech enthusiasts, they really do offer a lot that you just cannot get with the main four platforms, Samsung Smartthings to some extent has more control.

Smartthings is. By the way, I just need to say this very clearly. Smartthings is some of the most chaotic software I've ever used in my entire life. Is that because you're trying to use it with the tv? Yeah, I have frame tvs.

Smartthings is like a web based platform, and sometimes you open the app and it just doesn't show up. Yeah, that's weird. Downloading drivers as it goes. It's just a deeply weird platform. Yeah, well, and because it did what home assistant is trying to do ten years ago, which is moved from being an open source hobbyist enthusiast community to a mainstream platform, it had the power of Samsung behind it to do that.

Jen Tuohy

It still has some really great deep dive tools and automations you can do, but then you also just can't get it to turn your tv on, which you should do. I agree. But yes, ultimately, I think what I've been seeing is a shift of the big smart home platforms towards the local control, because that's what matter is bringing. So I think that these hubs like home assistant and Homebridge and Habitat and homey is another one. And a Cara, I think they're actually providing almost a roadmap for where I think we'll end up seeing the big platforms going, because everyone will need a matter controller to control matter devices.

And I think those matter controllers, which right now are things like your Apple TV and your Google Nest hubs. I think we're going to see those devices get more powerful and be able to do more in your home and actually become hubs again. They started out by not being hubs, and I think eventually we're going to go full circle and they're going to become our smart home hubs and we'll have multiple of them in the home, so that when one fails, our smart homes will still work and we will all love our smart homes eventually. I feel like this big question of I'm going to turn my house into a computer, but I don't quite know where that computer is or who's running it or who's responsible for managing it. There are some attempts at solutions here.

Neil I. Patel

You have the platforms on the major smartphones, Amazon, you have things like home assistant, you have these protocols that are developing like matter, but without solving that first problem, just making it conceptually easy to understand what is happening, it feels like there's going to be a roadblock to mass adoption for quite a while. Is the industry working on that? Do you see that in your reporting or is it just 1ft in front of the other? No, I do not think the industry is working on that, but I do think they should be. I think right now they are in this 1ft in front of the other stage because there's this push to make people understand the benefits of the smart home.

Jen Tuohy

I don't think there has been anywhere near enough attention paid to explaining to people how it's actually working in your home and how you can control it. Because troubleshooting the smart home right now, matter thread home kit, any of them, is impossible. And the idea behind it, I think, is to try and make it user friendly and easy so that you don't have to worry about being a sysadmin for your house. But it also means that when it breaks, you're stuck. And then you just throw up your hands and say, I'm done, I'm getting dumb lights and a key again.

So we need more transparency around that. People aren't stupid. People want to know what they're doing. People are used to computers and phones and understanding how these devices work. So yes, I agree, we need much more transparency there.

We need the tools to be able to, you know, control, understand how the computers in our homes are working. But ultimately, if we get to the point where you actually make this all work seamlessly, work locally, so not relying on the cloud, we shouldn't be running into those problems as much, and then we shouldn't have to worry just as, just as seamless as Bluetooth and Wifi is today, the smart home will be one day. All right, we'll have you back. When that happens, you let me know. Jen, thanks so much for coming to coder.

Neil I. Patel

This was great. We could keep talking about this for many more hours, I'm sure, but thank you so much for having me.

Thanks again to Gen twoy for joining us on Decoder. As you can tell, I love talking to Jen about smart home stuff. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you have thoughts about this episode or what you'd like to hear more of on Decoder, you can email us@decoderge.com. Dot we really do read all the emails.

You can also hit me up directly on threads. I'm at we have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun for as long as it lasts.

If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of the Verge and part of the Vox Media podcast network. Today's episode was produced by Kate Cox, Nick Stat. It was edited by Cali Wright.

Supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

Why the tech industry can't crack the smart home

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1: Introduction

2: The Matter Standard

3: Open-source Solutions

4: Future of Smart Homes

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